On 1/8/2016 2:01 PM, K. Peachey wrote:
On 7 January 2016 at 22:45, Andreas Kolbe
<jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
...
I am also struck by the fact that the grant is really a very paltry one,
compared to the resources the Foundation is investing in this. The
MediaWiki page on Discovery[2] lists sixteen people working on this.
$250,000 would hardly begin to cover their salaries.
In fact, Risker said as long ago as May last year,[3]
...
I'm not sure what the standard is for grant applications is in the US,
but
I know locally that is it is extremely rare that allow the funding to be
used to pay for salaries and the likes, Although the grant applications I
used to have common knowledge were designed to have a physical end goal as
per the agreement (example: Replace kitchen cabinets in a Scout den)
compared to what will be software changes.
While it depends on the purpose of the
grant, for the deliverables
identified in the original post it seems clear that the most natural
costs to pay would be salaries in software engineering, broadly
speaking. As to the comment about how the grant amount aligns with the
size and salary cost of this particular team - in the grantmaking world,
it is entirely normal to make awards that pay for only fractions of
people's salaries. Let's say you pay for 5% of X's salary and 10% of Y's
salary, and as part of the agreement those people are then expected to
spend the corresponding percentage of their time dedicated to working on
the grant project. I'm sure that the Discovery team has more things to
work on than just this one project, but the reason the Foundation would
accept this grant is presumably that it overlaps enough with what the
organization wants to do anyway.
--Michael Snow